Honda Opens Demonstration Smart Home, With Fit EV Electric Car In Garage

Most of us think "Honda" and bring up economy cars, perhaps lawnmowers, or even portable generators. Complete houses aren't usually on the list.

Yesterday, though, the Japanese carmaker opened its Honda Smart Home US in Davis, California--demonstrating its ideas for how Americans might live a zero-carbon life in the 21st Century.

California often pushes the envelope in new technology, and with its corporate home in the Orange County city of Torrance, Honda opted to site its low-impact living testbed on the campus of the University of California at Davis

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Davis is flat, sunny, and laced with bike paths, and it's just outside the state capital of Sacramento, about 80 miles east of San Francisco.

UC-Davis has long had an emerging West Campus residential community, including space and support staff for these kinds of experiments in living.

Low-impact homes are a topic of discussion around the world, with considerable interest in places like Australia and California, where sun power is plentiful but water can be scarce.

The Honda Smart Home represents about 2,000 square feet, all of it optimized toward energy-efficient living. It's fitted with LED lighting, radiant heating and cooling, a massive geothermal recovery system, a large solar photovoltaic panel system, and even a grey-water filtering and recovery system.

The home is actually designed to be energy positive, contributing electricity to the grid and even including a battery storage system both to capture excess energy and to provide a backup in case of blackouts or peak power demands.